AMD Kaveri Review: A10-7850K, A10-7700K and A8-7600

Gaming Performance

3DMark11

3DMark 11 is a DirectX 11 video card benchmark test for Windows that is designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance. 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of DirectX 11 features including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Download here.

3DMark

The new 3DMark includes everything you need to benchmark your hardware. With three all new tests you can bench everything from smartphones and tablets, to notebooks and home PCs, to the latest high-end, multi-GPU gaming desktops. Download here.

In the past gaming on integrated graphics wasn’t something that was viable but today both Intel and AMD have come a significant way in making gaming on integrated graphics possible, as the above 3DMark results demonstrate. We’ve had a run around in six games, all of which are graphically intensive and well respected titles. We selected our in-game settings, which you can see more of on the testing methods page, based on what would give realistic playable frame rates.

Up first is Batman Arkham Origins and we can’t really see much in the way of performance improvements at 1080p on Kaveri. At 720p we see a large jump from Richland to Kaveri, especially with the two 45W parts. Intel’s Haswell puts up a solid fight at 720p but tails off significantly at 1080p due to the weak iGPUs.

Battlefield 4 is one of the biggest gaming titles out right now and we can see why AMD have invested so much into optimising for Battlefield 4. The results have really paid off! The slowest Kaveri part was about 15% faster than the best Richland part. All the Kaveri APUs offer a smooth playable experience at 1080p but the A10-7850K looks the most promising if you’re interested in cranking those detail settings up. Remember none of our results include overclocking so the best is yet to come for AMD’s Kaveri APUs in gaming.

Bioshock gave some more fantastic performance boosts for Kaveri with the slowest Kaveri part again being faster than the best Richland part. AMD’s A10-7850K had more than double the performance of Intel’s Core i5 4440 which is an impressive achievement. It’s also impressive that the A8-7600 was able to more than double the performance of the Core i3 4330 in 65W mode despite being a cheaper part.

Metro Last Light is a very demanding game and the Kaveri parts showed a nice 10% boost. The scaling isn’t as impressive as in Bioshock Infinite or Battlefield 4 but there’s certainly something to show for the improved graphics.

Sleeping Dogs, like Metro Last Light, showed about 10% scaling from Richland to Kaveri. The A8-7600 showed a massive jump in performance over the A8-6500T while the A8-6500T still managed to shield off competition from the two Haswell parts by a 10% margin. However, it is worth knowing that Sleeping Dogs is a very “AMD optimised” game.

Our final gaming title was Tomb Raider where we see Kaveri doing well again. The flagship part has managed to do very well thanks to those extra 2 GPU compute cores over the A10-7700K, the A8-7600 also continues its trend of doing consistently well. In fact the A8-7600 throughout this entire review has been within touching distance of the A10-7700K when in 65W mode suggesting that if overclocking isn’t your thing then there is no real reason to spend more on the A10-7700K over the A8-7600.